Over the next twenty-five years, there will be an additional 14.5 million deaths and a significant decline in quality of life due to climate-related events such as droughts, floods, and rising sea levels, as well as increased disease rates exacerbated by global warming.
Alongside the economic losses amounting to $12.5 trillion, healthcare costs will rise by $1.1 trillion, according to the official website of the World Economic Forum.
By 2050, there could be up to 1.2 billion climate refugees and an additional 500 million people at risk of malaria and dengue fever as rising temperatures expand the geographical range of disease-carrying mosquitoes in Europe and North America.
Between now and the year 2050, food and water scarcity will also be major health challenges for billions of people.
How can we avoid this scenario?
Even though these projected statistics paint a dire picture, by acting now, we can potentially prevent the worst of these impacts.
The World Economic Forum website states that a series of rapid and focused investments in research and development of new vaccines and other preventive measures, treatments, and technologies could reduce up to half of the negative health outcomes of climate change.
And for this to happen, a new report by the World Economic Forum and Oliver Wyman, to be published on January 17, 2025, estimates that investment in climate-related life sciences innovations must reach $65 billion over the next five to eight years.
While this seems significant, it is less than 5% of the global pharmaceutical industry's annual spending on research and development today.
This level of investment could save 6.5 million lives and avoid $5.8 trillion in global economic losses, as well as a billion years of improved life by preventing various disabilities and chronic diseases related to climate.
Improving health outcomes
To overcome the health crisis, policymakers should consider mechanisms to facilitate funding for research and development and strengthen health systems and supply chains worldwide.
The World Economic Forum, in its report, considers that the key to addressing the health impacts of climate change will be working with the same urgency and collaboration between governments and industry that allowed biotech companies to produce COVID-19 vaccines in less than a year.
While providing adequate investment is a crucial element, mitigation will also require the widespread adoption of public-private partnerships and innovative financing mechanisms. However, there are barriers to these climate-driven health solutions.
Removing obstacles to private investment
The World Economic Forum report states that one of the major barriers to adequate investment is the uncertainty regarding the time it will take to develop and adopt new climate-driven health solutions and the level of their eventual adoption.
The ambiguity surrounding the timeline for return on investment discourages private sector investors and pharmaceutical companies from allocating sufficient resources.
Public health is already witnessing this stagnation in the introduction of new antibiotics, a category in which only 12 drugs have been developed since 2017.
One of the most important steps taken by governments during the COVID-19 pandemic was to ensure appropriate incentives for pharmaceutical companies by pre-purchasing millions of doses of vaccines while they were still in development.
And for climate-related health treatments, the industry and potential investors will benefit from similar guarantees that new treatments will achieve commercial scalability and provide a reasonable return on investment, as COVID-19 treatments did.
And working together within the framework of public-private partnerships to understand and overcome these types of barriers and build incentives will be crucial for achieving success.
Less developed economies, known to bear the brunt of the early health impacts of climate change, struggle to finance the necessary public health treatments. Therefore, funding efforts must be global and attract widespread support from more economically advanced countries.
But while diseases exacerbated by climate will be concentrated among the most vulnerable populations, many of them are expected to spread rapidly.
An example of this is mosquito-borne diseases such as malaria and dengue fever, which primarily affect people in Africa and Asia today.
Disease-carrying mosquitoes are already moving into North America and Europe due to global warming, and by the end of the century, up to 8.4 billion people could be at risk of malaria and dengue fever annually.
Regulatory frameworks
Among the other complexities facing biopharmaceutical innovations are the uncoordinated regulatory, financial, and tax incentives between countries, which makes it difficult for companies to develop coherent strategies across multiple regions.
This may limit the extent of climate-driven innovative health solutions and dampen the incentive to develop new products. Unclear or unpredictable regulatory pathways and the lack of technical and regulatory capacity in low- and middle-income countries could hinder investment and prevent the large-scale production of high-quality products at reduced costs.
The accelerated approval of COVID-19 vaccines by the FDA in 2020 demonstrates how flexible regulatory frameworks can expedite critical healthcare solutions.
The regulatory facilitation of COVID-19 treatments was a key factor in enabling patients to quickly access vaccines and reducing the most negative impacts of the virus to less than two years.
Another example of the need for more flexible and supportive regulation is the enactment of the US Orphan Drug Act of 1983, which aimed to make it financially feasible for drug manufacturers to develop treatments for rare diseases.
Raising awareness
None of this can happen without policymakers, industry leaders, and the public recognizing the threat of global warming and the need for climate-driven health solutions.
Scientists now assert that there is a limited time for climate action, as global warming is predicted to surpass 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030, marking a crucial turning point for climate risks.
And this leaves less than five years to develop new treatments, strengthen the global health system, and create the type of public-private collaboration necessary to scale up the deployment of such solutions and services.
